Analysis performed by Scorekeeper, worth reading IMHO.
Notable quote from the analysis - "Of the 15 games where there was a difference in the number of “freebies” given up where there was a winner, 73% of the time, the team that gave up the fewest “freebies” won the game!"
Would be interesting to see how this holds up under a very large sample size.
SK's writeup (hope he doesn't mind this being posted here):
Recently I was looking at different stats to see if baseball dogma held up about what affects winning and losing. One thing I looked at was how strikeouts related to W/L. Turns out that although the team whose pitchers recorded the most strikeouts won more often than not, only winning 53% of the games isn’t really enough of a difference to make me want to bet the house on it.
I also looked at 1st pitch strike percentage and number of pitches, but although it seems those things are a stronger bet to produce a win, they aren’t all that strong a bet either. The teams that had the highest 1st strike percentage for a game won 59% of the time and the team that threw the fewest pitches per batter won 53% of the time.
However, when comparing Walks and HBP’s to W/L, something showed up that might make even the most conservative gambler bet on. Of the 15 games where there was a difference in the number of “freebies” given up where there was a winner, 73% of the time, the team that gave up the fewest “freebies” won the game!
Conclusion? People can rant and rave all they want about how important it is to get K’s, but at least from my data, and I acknowledge it is a small sample, it appears to be much more important to have control over velocity or overwhelming “stuff”.
But even though I saw that 1st pitch strikes seemed to be something a team would want to have their pitchers throw, I was troubled that it didn’t seem to be all that important. Not that it’s a big deal, but its something that seems to have a very high place in the normal baseball thinking as being something very desirable.
So, I set out at trying to prove to some degree of certainty, just why it’s a big deal. After all, 59% is a darn good number and certainly a bettor will come out ahead, it doesn’t exactly seem as important as the 73% having fewer walks generates.
So, I ran some reports for last fall’s HS team, this season’s HS team, the 2 years my son played HS ball I had numbers for, and 2 years of JUCO ball I scored for, to see what, if anything, I could see.
The 1st thing on the report is hits. There were a total of 2,335 hits, and to my surprise, 1,400 of them, or 60%, came on or after a 1st pitch strike! Personally, I’d have thought just the opposite, but since every hit is a strike, and its only possible to get a hit on a strike, that number isn’t really all that surprising.
The next thing on the report is Outs/Errors. There were a total of 4,638 outs/errors made in those games and 61% came on or after a 1st pitch strike. Like hits, that’s not all that surprising, since its pretty difficult to make an out on a 1st pitch ball.
The next category however, K’s, let’s out what’s possible on the 1st pitch, simply because it takes more than 1 pitch to record a strike. There were 1,528 K in all those games, but the number of K’s occurring after a 1st pitch strike was 65%! Now that’s a pretty significant number!
But as good as that number is, when I looked at walks, things got even more surprising. There were 945 walks, and more than 75% came after the 1st pitch was a ball! To me, that coupled with the fact that teams who walk or hit the fewest seem to win 73% of the time, I’m getting a clearer picture of everything.
But just to see if I could get even more accurate about what was goin’ on, I added in the HBP’s with the walks, since that’s what the 73% stat included. To my surprise, although the number of batters whacked after the 1st pitch was a ball was about twice what it was if the 1st pitch was a strike, when I added everything together, it came out to guess what? 73%, exactly the same as what the percentage of wins for a team giving up the fewest walks or HBPs in a game!
Conclusion? I’m not positive about saying this is what will happen across the board because the sample is so small, but I can say that the tendencies and percentages seem to hold up and are consistent for 5 years, at least for the teams I score. Those teams include 3 teams that went to playoffs at the end of the year, if it makes any difference.
Well, I don’t know that I’ve really proven anything, but at least I think I’ve made a case for pounding it into pitcher’s heads that they need to get ahead of the batter right from the 1st pitch, or they increase the risk of giving up a walk, and that increases the risk of losing the game. ;-)
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